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Milestones in the Annals of Junkmail
fdc writes: "Web pages are a great source of postal
addresses for direct mailers. Judging by some of the
addresses we've seen recently, it's evident that the data is
harvested not by humans, but by computer programs that scan web
pages for names and addresses. Several weeks ago we (the
Kermit
Project at
Columbia University)
announced a new release of our Kermit 95
communication software for Windows -- SSH, secure FTP, etc; cousin
of C-Kermit
for Unix (search Freshmeat). Since this was a major release, we
chose a new icon for it: the Columbia
crown. A web page
explained that this is the emblem of Columbia University: the
crown of King George the II of England (1727-1760), who founded
Columbia in 1754. JUST ONE WEEK LATER guess who received a postcard from
Dell."
It would be very easy to interpret such simple encoding with a bot. I would think that such bots already exist that filter not only that but removing NOSPAM from e-mail addresses which seems to be another popular attempt at keeping a public e-mail address semi-private.
That is a little different. The data you received clearly had a common structure as it was just retrieved from a database and placed into a template.
Actually analysing language is a much more difficult task. Just look at the very imperfect quality of language translation tools on Google and Altavista to see just how hard it is.
Let's definitely contact Dell in that case, then. Don't you think they'd be very interested to learn that the marketing firm they were buying their address lists from populates their database with information that is largely completely inaccurate?
It seems much more likely that someone on the team was registering for something somewhere and, wanding to avoid stupid spam, put in the clever King persona instead.
Promptly forgotten, it was a surprise when Dell, seemingly unrelated to the registration account, sends email to that profile.
More than likely someone on your team remembers it now, but finds the alternative 'harvesting' explanation so funny he's keeping quiet.
Kevin Fox
"Companies like Dell don't harvest addressess. They deal with direct marketing companies"
Hiring a marketing company to do some work in your name makes you liable for whatever they do in your name.
--- Hindsight is 20/20, but walking backwards is not the answer.
Companies like Dell don't harvest addressess. They deal with direct marketing companies who either do the harvesting, ...
Actually, nobody involved here did any "harvesting" of any addresses. "Harvesting" implies that they did something to earn their list of addresses, something akin to sowing and nurturing a field of crops. They did nothing of the sort.
A better term for such behavior would be something like "scraped" or "dredged", something more appropriately descriptive of the indiscriminate collecting of addresses on a large scale. It's a change in usage that I would like to see happen. "Harvested" seems to have become something of a de facto standard term for the practice, unfortunately.
There is a place for "harvested" in describing a list of addresses. This would be an appropriate term for a list of addresses built up by (confirmed) opt-in, i.e. everyone on the list knowingly consented to be on that list, for whatever the purpose of that list is.
However, unlike agricultural harvests, a harvested list cannot be sold or given away. The moment it is transferred to someone other than the harvester, it's junk, it's garbage; it's beyond useless, in fact, as it would be counter-productive if ever used.
-- keith lim keithlim@pobox.com http://pobox.com/~keithlim/
For me, postal spam it's not as bad as email, because it doesn't cost you in disk space or bandwidth.
There's 10 types of people in this world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
ken@kenkinder.com